Turns out that when you study digital literacies and social media, you tend to be more active around the web than on your own site. That’s the case for me, anyway. Others are much better at this than I.
So if you’re looking for more information on me and my whereabouts and thoughts, thanks! You might find out more by visiting my Friendfeed, my public Twitter account, or my Facebook page. I am more active there than here, mostly because I’m saving all my writing energies for the book manuscript I’m working on. Trying to be a diligent junior academic, you know.
And if you’re just looking for some quick information on who I am and what I do, visit my “About” page here. The gist: I’m an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where I am a member of the Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics Program. I teach first-year writing courses and graduate courses on videogames and social media.
Before I came to ASU I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where I worked with Henry Jenkins on the New Media Literacies Project. I did my PhD in English (Rhetoric and Composition Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was a founding member of the Games+Learning+Society program in the School of Education. It was directed by James Paul Gee and Kurt Squire, with whom I worked to develop some of the early research on videogames and literacy learning.
My work has shifted a bit from videogames to social media more broadly. I consider myself a digital literacies researcher, especially with regard to how people use language in social media spaces, both online and off.
Thanks again for stopping by!
This week at the Games+Learning+Society conference, Local no. 12 (Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, Eric Zimmerman, and Mike Edwards) made a game called Backchatter. I will post more thoughts on the game later on, but Eric asked me to say a few words about why I thought the game is meaningful to those of us at the conference. I noted a few of these things during the awards ceremony but here’s what I wrote up in preparation for those oral comments.
Backchannels are a term from psycholinguistics, referring to the sounds or gestures people make when they’re in conversation or listening to others. “Mmm hmm,” “yes,” “yeah,” “ok,” “right,” etc. Nodding, acknowledging. However, they are popularly known as subversive– like passing notes in class.
In games, backchannels take place as “whispers” (in MMOs) or asychronously as forums or boards.
The backchatter game, however, by giving us rules and play, has had the effect of creating an collaborative narrative about an event, in real time. As the story unfolds, we are able to decide as a group what’s important, what’s interesting, and, to play upon a Seinfeld reference to a woman’s contraceptive device, what’s “tweet-worthy.”
Backchatter also instantly placed us all in the perspective of what it’s like to be a novice or student in a land of experts. Those who were new to Twitter and those who’ve been using Twitter for two long years or more– all of us played with the system and customized it for our needs as players and writers of the story of this conference. We didn’t just listen, talk, and experience. We wrote the story of it.
Teachers often worry (for good reason, sometimes) that backchannels are subversive, but I would suggest that subversiveness with backchannels and backchatter can also be good. Some systems *ought* to be subverted, and I think Julian did a great job of taking us through how that might work for good. But he also pointed out that subverting a system can, over time, take on a pernicious quality, doing harm over the long term even when it’s intended only to have a short term effect. That’s definitely true. It’s the difference between a flash mob and a smart mob, for example.
Backchatter can be seen as “doing it for the lulz.” But I think it’s more than that. It gives people a safe, low-cost, informal way to care about participating in an event in real time. By doing so we write the story of the event and immediately decide whether it’s a success, whether these conversations and ideas are worth sharing in the first place. In that sense, Backchatter has played a part in developing a culture around our thoughts and ideas about games, learning, and society. Through our play, we think together.
Backchannels It gives us a chance to run simulations, to test out what we are passionate about, to see whether those passions have any traction with others who share our interests. Those are the seeds of social change.
We were rewarded for active participation, yes. But even more, we were rewarded for caring. Backchatter developed an occasion to share our personal stories and be invested in the social and public need to do so. It helped us articulate the “grit” of our passions, giving them traction and, hopefully, persistence beyond these few days together.
I am a member of a listserv for folks who work in the areas of rhetoric, writing, teaching, and technology. Recently, someone raised the question of how to properly use and cite images found on the web. There are many different responses one could offer, but this is what I wrote in response. It all depends on context, etc. Still, these small notes might be useful.
Dear Listserv Writer:
First of all: thumbs-up for asking!
There are lots of ways to go about using images you find on the web. My general rule is to only use Creative Commons-licensed images that allow for non-commercial, share-alike use. You can very easily find those images using the Creative Commons search page: http://search.creativecommons.org/#
In fact, they’ve even got a project dedicated to teaching and learning about licenses and educational materials – http://learn.creativecommons.org
When I find an image that I’d like to use (typically through the CC search of Flickr), I download it and send a quick email to the user to tell him/her that I’m using it and what I’m using it for. Or, if I’m not yet sure I want to use it, I’ll download it and save the file with something like IMAGE DESCRIPTION – FLICKR USERNAME. PNG or something. That way I can keep track of whose image it is so that I can tell them later how and where I used it.
I also license my own work with Creative Commons, including slide decks, published syllabi, and my personal website. I’ve found that folks take pics of slides while I’m giving talks. They also record talks without asking for permissions. So licensing stuff up-front keeps you covered and gives people the credit they deserve for offering up the images in the first place.
Here’s an example of a slide deck of mine that uses and attributes images - http://www.slideshare.net/alist/robison-new-agendas-for-media-literacy
For more information, I HIGHLY recommend the Center for Social Media’s work on this, especially their piece on “The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy.” See here – http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/the_cost_of_copyright_confusion_for_media_literacy/
They also offer plenty of “best practices” and FAQs for students, researchers, and educators.
Hope this is useful.
-Alice
I just had to post this real quick, cuz it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. 
So I post these things to Twitter with some regularity, but thought I’d post them here too, for the record. People often ask me what I’m playing and listening to and watching, etc. So here’s a short list (though you can check out the links on the right side of this page for more details). All of these are in no particular order cuz I’m being lazy and have a stack of grading to do at the moment.
Music
Diplo
Peter Bjorn and John
N.A.S.A.
Ra Ra Riot
The Main Drag
Dan Deacon
Love Language
Detektivbyran
Beirut
Pinback
Games
Dawn of War 2 (PC)
And Yet it Moves (PC/Mac, available on Steam)
The Maw (XBLA)
RezHD (XBLA)
Drop 7 (iPhone)
KarmaStar (iPhone)
ZenBound (iPhone)
Fieldrunners (iPhone)
Uncategorized
Tweetie (iPhone Twitter client)
Slate’s Political Gabfest (podcast)
NPR’s Planet Money (podcast)
NYTimes Political Points (podcast)
iTalk (for recording interviews with iPhone)
Quicksilver for Mac
It’s been a great semester. I’m finally starting to figure out how to navigate ASU, which is a big, huge place. I sometimes say it’s like going to school in an airport. People are buzzing by all the time, you’re always looking for a place you can’t quite find, and there are planes flying overhead at all times. (The Phoenix airport is right in the middle of the city, so there really are planes flying over the ASU campus a lot of the time.)
At this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, I presented some work I’ve been doing at ASU’s SMALLab. (More about that later.) I also went to South by Southwest Interactive, which was good times. I hadn’t been to that conference in 15 years! I’m glad to see that it’s grown so much.
Next up is a trip back to Cambridge for the Media in Transition conference at MIT at the end of the month. After that is Games for Change in NYC, a trip to PBS for a meeting with the Engage board of advisors, and perhaps a visit to Beyond Broadcast in Los Angeles. But I might just cancel all of that and work on my writing instead. Looking forward to a summer devoted to that.
I suppose I could say that since I spent two years in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I have become totally compelled by the reading and writing practices of those who are fairly immersed in the culture of digital and social media. Perhaps because I didn’t grow up in this world and am still very much an outsider (or “participant observer,” I suppose), I am hooked by things like ROFLcon, flowcharts, and my friend Kevin’s obsession with YouTube videos of people dancing.
Just now I got an email from Facebook, notifying me that Donna Alvermann, a literacy scholar whose work I admire, had posted something on my wall. I clicked through to my Facebook page and saw that she had thanked me for sharing a link on my Google Reader feed, which forwards to my Facebook account and posts them as news items each time I share something on my feed. In this case, what I had shared was a link to a videoblog website called EPIC FU. On that website was a linked video from a guy named Jay Smooth, a radio DJ and videoblogger who runs New York’s longest-running hiphop radio show on WBAI. EPIC FU posted Jay Smooth’s video, which is linked through his YouTube stream and his website. The video is a three-minute piece about the kinds of conversations we have about race, with Smooth’s recommendations for the best ways to have those conversations. It’s phenomenal.
[Side note: the reason I know about EPIC FU is twofold. The first is that I found it as a subscription service through my TiVo, which downloads EPIC FU episodes to my DVR. The second is that Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf, the couple who produce EPIC FU, are on the PBS Engage advisory board with me. I liked their videoblog before, but now that I know them and follow their Twitter feeds too, I am more apt to spend time with EPIC FU online and have pretty much ditched my TiVo version.]
In her post on my Facebook wall, Professor Alvermann wanted to let me know that she plans on using the video this spring in a course she’s teaching on literacy and popular culture. I replied to her wall post with a Facebook email. I explained to her in that email that I have created an RSS feed from my del.icio.us network of friends and contacts. The feed collects all the sites that people in my network have bookmarked and sends it to my RSS reader. Additionally, Google Reader has a feature that allows those of us who use it to “share” items we see in our feeds. Facebook has a feature (an API?) that pulls what I share on Google Reader and posts it on my Facebook wall. I allow those wall posts to show up in my news feed, which thus shows up in my Facebook friends’ feeds too, which is how Professor Alvermann came across it.
When I emailed Professor Alvermann, I confessed to her that I probably spend about 3-4 hours each day reading, watching, listening, and commenting on things I see online. Though if I’m being totally honest, there are a couple of days each week when I spend even more time than that. I concede that some of my reading consists of simply seeing rather than full on meaning-making, but on the whole I’m doing a *lot* of reading and writing, much more than I ever imagined I would. Access and immersion in a culture are powerful things, but they are most meaningful when combined with one another.
Since my training is in the study of how people read, write, and learn, this stuff is my bread and butter. As I get more immersed in the literacy practices surrounding (mostly digital) social media, I can see why people in library and information science are so far ahead of the game. Likewise, scholars in HCI and communications and media studies have been studying and participating in this for years, not to mention the people who actually make a living at it. I am happy to say that English departments are catching up. (I heard that there were more than a handful of social and digital media presentations at MLA this week. Yay!)
So in my case, I read and receive information online in three primary ways: links shared through RSS, links shared through my del.icio.us network, and links shared through my Twitter feed. In each case, links are almost always combined with some kind of contextual annotation.
- RSS Feed. Google Reader works well for me, and there are several “pure” feeds I read almost daily. That is, these are feeds that come straight from the sources that produce them, like a columnist from the New York Times or a videoblog like EPIC FU. However, I also subscribe to feeds that are already aggregated. For example, Australian social media scholar Tama Leaver regularly posts “annotated links” throughout the week via his personal blog. So I have a feed for that. What’s most interesting is that Google Reader has a “sharing” feature. What that means is that if I want to, I can share items in my feed with others who also use Google’s RSS reader. We both have to turn on the feature, but what that does is allow me to see what my friends are saying is interesting and vice versa. I get a window into the feeds that they read regularly, too. Sometimes I will ditch one of my own feeds and just read what they share instead. Aggregators upon aggregators.
- Del.icio.us. I also have the aforementioned feed for my del.icio.us network. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means that I can link with others and read what they’re reading. If they save a link, I can see that link (if they want me to). Plus, del.icio.us encourages users to annotate and tag what they share. When people tag their items, it makes it easier for me to search, too. So whenever I want to know about a good Photoshop or Twitter tutorial, I’ll go use del.icio.us instead of a Google search. That way I can be sure to get some kind of filter that’s a step beyond what Google’s algorithm allows. For what that’s worth, anyway.
- Twitter. Finally, I follow the links that folks in my Twitter feed post from time to time. These can go anywhere and most of the time people are tweeting or re-tweeting the same things. But while there might be less variety, the links I get through my Twitter network are the freshest. I think it’s safe to say that I get my breaking news through Twitter. And while I also subscribe to a NYTimes text service that sends me breaking news alerts via my iPhone, usually those text alerts are slower than the Twitter community.
There are many, many more things to say about all of this. In fact, there are so many people talking about it that my head spins when I think about how much reading I still need to do. From a literacy perspective though, it’s stunning. I think about just my own primary habits described above and feel the need to explain that while I am immersed in this culture, I wouldn’t say that my practices are extreme. At the same time, I know there might be folks who read this with surprise. There are also folks who will read it and say that this is why I’m not publishing more. But they say that about my videogame play too. My general response is to say that for me, it’s all research. Learning about it helps me understand how and why my students write and learn to write. It helps me see how and why those things are changing and what we can do to understand their literacy habits and practices better.
Anyway I hope my course next semester produces a lot of good discussion and research in this area of social media and digital cultures. Fingers crossed, my students are ready for it.
*It is a running joke among those who know me that although I have a PhD in English, I can barely get through a novel anymore. I suppose part of the reason for that is that I’d rather be reading other things. And part of it is probably that once I learned all the tricks, I got bored. There’s not much out there that I haven’t seen before. But before you start arguing that my dying interest in novel-reading is due to the fact that I read online all the time and that my attention span has been shortened, let me say no! I am perfectly capable of reading endless amounts of nonfiction. I can read lengthy articles in scholarly journals (can you??), I can read lots and lots of student papers, and I can breeze through complicated investigative journalism. Attention is definitely not the problem. I just don’t find fiction that pleasurable these days. Maybe that will change, but for now, that’s that.
I traveled to rural New Hampshire to visit a friend last weekend. I was there for about 24 hours before the worst ice storm in ten years came upon us. No water, heat, or electricity. We had a wood stove, though, and gas on the stove for cooking. The folks across the road got their generator going, but it was pretty scary stuff. Trees were cracking from the ice, wires were down everywhere, and we were all fairly stir-crazy after just one day of it. I learned very quickly that I am *not* a country girl. At the first opportunity, I managed to get out. They got another round of ice, though, and my friends are hoping to have electricity by Christmas. Sending warm wishes their way.
In this case, “The Man” is a good thing. You want to be The Man. Because if you are The Man, you can be made forever gloriously happy by this extraordinary video tribute.
Friends and colleagues know that I share things via email, Twitter, Google Reader, and Del.icio.us. It’s rare that I see something that is just so fantastic that I feel the need to post it on my site. And so, enjoy. Hope you love it as much as I did. If so, you are officially as nerdy as I am.
(Many thanks to Tama Leaver for making my world consistently interesting. I swear, sir, that your RSS feed is my very favorite.)
You betcha. (I’m just tickled that someone got this past his or her editor.)
